The Women's Decameron

The Women's Decameron takes Boccaccio's idea of storytelling in a time of plague, and shifts it to the Soviet Union. Ten women share their experiences. The quality of their stories is uneven, but the composite picture is fascinating. Some of the tales are rude and raunchy: Albina (3.4), working as a call-girl, returns with an American businessman before her KGB minders have had time to vacate his hotel room, and the spies' experience gives a painful new meaning to the phrase "Reds under the bed". These women have to struggle to get by, but their actions sometimes rise to a level of everyday heroism. A few examples: a woman goes back to her drunken, violent husband when he gets cancer, leaving the much nicer man with whom she had hoped to set up house (9.1). A mother dies in prison camp for killing her violent husband with an axe - although in fact it was her son who struck the blow (9.2). A prison camp guard risks his career to let a woman prisoner have one hour's freedom in the countryside (9.6). Well worth reading, this book testifies to the power of Boccaccio's original storytelling formula in his Decameron (set in 1348). The Women's Decameron takes its place beside other modern versions such as Christopher White's The Gay Decameron (1998), and the forthcoming Jane Smiley novel, Ten Days in the Hills (announced for February 2007).

A modern feminine version of Boccaccio's Work.The author is a very brave challenger.Her version is a bunch of highly imaginative and very witty tales of 10 women in a hospital.The tales cover through the clever choice of very diferent characters (engineer, secretary, stewardess, tramp...) all spectra of the woman psyche and of the man/woman relations : first love, assault and rape, seduction and abandonment, unfaithfulness and jealousy, revenge, happiness, generosity, sex encounters ...They are brilliantly written with a wide range of moods and styles: sensual, vulgar, loving, cruel, sentimental, rude, affectionate, cynical, ironical ..Every tale is a little pearl by itself and had enough substance to be developed into a novel or a short story.The jokes are marvellous. To give a few:How is a woman well clad? When she gets dressed on credit, and undresses for cash.Don't push that much or are you perhaps a communist?Communism is the power of the Soviet and the alcoholisation of the country.The advantage of this book is that you don't have to read it in one go.It is a tour-de-force. Not to be missed.

This book explores the lives of ten women in the Soviet Union as they share their stories with each other. The stories are at once universal and very specific to that time in history. Each women's personality is beautifully developed as she tells her story.

I read this book in translation from the Russian a few years ago and have been trying to get a hold of my own copy ever since. It is based on the classical Italian "Decameron" but a modern-day Soviet version. In this book, which is fictional, but nonetheless blatantly based on real stories, ten Russian women go into hospital to give birth. Complications arise when a contagious disease begins to spread in the hospital, and so the women are isolated for ten days. During these ten days, in order to while away the boredom of complete quarrantine, they take it in turns to tell stories: a new subject every day. Every day, for ten days, each of the mothers-to-be in the ward tells a short story about something she has experienced. The subjects range from money, to sex, to rape, to secrets, and are a shocking testament to how women were treated in Soviet Russia, and the conditions they had to deal with. You will laugh and you will cry bitterly for them. I just wish this book was back in print - if you are listening, Boston Atlantic Monthly Press, please do something about this!!!!

I read this book in translation from the Russian a few years ago and have been trying to get a hold of my own copy ever since. It is based on the classical Italian "Decameron" but a modern-day Soviet version. In this book, which is fictional, but nonetheless blatantly based on real stories, ten Russian women go into hospital to give birth. Complications arise when a contagious disease begins to spread in the hospital, and so the women are isolated for ten days. During these ten days, in order to while away the boredom of complete quarrantine, they take it in turns to tell stories: a new subject every day. Every day, for ten days, each of the mothers-to-be in the ward tells a short story about something she has experienced. The subjects range from money, to sex, to rape, to secrets, and are a shocking testament to how women were treated in Soviet Russia, and the conditions they had to deal with. You will laugh and you will cry bitterly for them. I just wish this book was back in print - if you are listening, Boston Atlantic Monthly Press, please do something about this!!!!